It’s been four years since we last saw Chloë Grace Moretz as Hit-Girl and Kick-Ass 2 sees the character trying to balance her ultraviolent crime fighting with high-school and growing up.

Speaking exclusively to SciFiNow, Moretz told us that returning to the character of Mindy McReady was definitely a challenge. “It was weird because on the first one I was 11,” she reveals.

“First of all, as a movie actor, to revisit your character is crazy because you drop your character off after four months of filming it and you’re gone to the next film and you revisit the character to talk about it for press. To actually have to get into what my state of mind was when I was 11 and see where she would have come from then to now was super weird. And trying to reinvent her but you can’t really because the character’s already on screen. So you almost catch yourself going ‘Oh, I wish I did this differently in the first one that way I could do this differently in the second one.'”

Now 15, Mindy is facing the emotional battleground that is high school. Fortunately for Moretz, she had some recent acting experience in that area. “I had a weekend off between Carrie and Kick-Ass 2,” she tells us.

“I went from being in pigs’ blood every night for two months to having a weekend off and then going straight to my leather purple outfit and fighting and doing crazy stuff, so it was very bipolar but I feel what it did for Hit Girl was it actually made her more emotional. Because I’d already been doing that serious of a role for such a period of time that I actually had a file of emotions that I could just throw into a scene. So it made everything easier access for me. So I think it made Hit Girl more dynamic in a way.”

As to the question of whether she sees Mindy as a role model for young people, Moretz has “In emotional ways, yeah. In the ways that she’s strong and the way that she conducts herself, yes and no. Because I don’t think you should deal with situations with bullies by making them sick and I don’t think you should beat people up.”

“I think that it teaches you that you have an inner superhero inside all of us and you can treat things with a higher form of justice which is just emotionally being sure. Which is an emotional problem with the youth in all of our countries; the common thing is that none of the kids around my age are self-assured at all. And none of them know who they are, so you need these characters for people to feel that it’s ok to not feel self-assured, but you can figure out who you are at a young age and not fall on your face doing it.”